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Unreal Development Kit ( UDK ): Royalty Threshold Raised to $50,000

Unreal Development Kit ( UDK ), a free set of tools and complete framework for game development, advanced visualizations and 3D simulations, based on Unreal Engine 3, becomes even more attractive for developers with new licensing terms by Epic. Mark Rein, vice-president of Epic Games, in official forum stated that licensing terms of UDK are changed — revenue threshold was raised by 10 times and now it's $50,000 instead of $5,000.

In this way UDK looks like even more attractive tool for game developers — raising revenue threshold should help new companies to keep more funds from their projects in the beginning and get on their feet before they should pay royalties to Epic.

Mark Rein, vice-president of Epic Games:

"We just wanted to let you know that we've raised the revenue threshold for UDK. Under the new rules you are not required to pay royalties on revenue earned from the use of UDK until that revenue exceeds US$50,000 which represents a 10-times increase over the previous threshold of US$5,000.

We're really excited about folks making some amazing things with UDK and we realize that a lot of you are just started in the business so not having to pay royalties on your first $50,000 should help you get a financial footing toward building a quality game development business.

One thing some folks didn't seem to realize is that whether you sell your product through digital distribution (or a retail location) the company doing the sale to the end user (called the "retailer") takes a cut (typically around 30%) for their efforts. The price they sell it for is called the retail price. The amount of money they pay to you on each sale is called the wholesale amount. When you pay us royalties you pay on the wholesale amount, i.e. the money you actually receive."

Well, that's pretty cool for those developers who can use all of the potential UDK provides and make commercial successfull projects on their own — first $50,000 of revenue will be completely yours, yey!

Sergey "Treidge" Danchenko is a founder and the author of 3DG.Me blog, 3D Artist and game developer, Drupal web-developer and one-man-band with experience in some other areas. Personal credo — "If you want a thing done well, do it yourself". In times of great inspiration writes poetry and plays volleyball. Primary professional tools — Autodesk Maya & Mudbox, Adobe Photoshop. Wild about turkeys and parrots, loves music and videogames. Thanks for reading and come again!

Yes, this is great news. It's good to see Epic supporting game developers in so many ways. With iphone support in UDK, and this new Royalty threshold, I think UDK will get a flock of new game developers.

And there was some news that Crytek thinks about releasing their CryEngine 3 SDK with terms much similar to UDK's - i.e. free or with small entry fee ( like $99 in UDK for commercial license ). Anyway, the whole industry moves towards "freemium" solutions - and we as developers will only benefit from it.